After community push, county seeks to develop new trash site

The Flathead County Solid Waste Board voted last week to approve building a new green box site in Bigfork.

Both Bigfork and Lakeside strongly opposed the board’s previous proposed consolidation of their trash-collection sites to a single site in Somers. Residents of both communities have voiced their concerns to the Solid Waste Board and asked them to look for other alternatives to consolidation.

“I think the county commissioners and the board realized people really like the container and green box sites,” Community Foundation for a Better Bigfork president Paul Mutascio said.

The new site will be near the corners of Montana Highway 35 and 83, near the Bigfork Cemetery and the Little Brown Church. The collection site will be set back from the roads and have berms and trees. “It will be considerably larger than what we have, with better access to the highway,” Flathead County Public Works director David Prunty said.

Prunty said the board still feels consolidation is the proper direction, they heard Bigfork when community members said they wanted the green boxes, and were willing to pay more to keep them.

“These folks in Bigfork said no, we want more and we’re willing to pay for it,” Prunty said. “When we heard that many times, we said, ‘well what can we do there?’”

A special assessment district will be established to support the operation of the new collection site. The county is putting together a committee that will be tasked with looking at cost scenarios of the special assessment district. People who reside in that district will see an increase in their taxes to pay for the improved green box site.

“We’re certainly early in the process,” Prunty said. But the preliminary estimate shows the addition charge for green box services in the special assessment district could be between $24 to $36 a year, about $2 or $3 more a month.

The county will buy the five acres of land from Tim Calaway and father-in-law Richard Whitaker.

The sale of the land hasn’t been finalized yet, Calaway said. Prunty said construction on the new site could begin in the summer of 2015. In the mean time, the current Bigfork green box site will remain open. The county’s contract with Valley Recycling ends at the end of December, and no additional recycling options will be added until the new site is built.

The new site will likely have a cardboard compactor and two 30-yard blue bins for recycling, and the cost to gather and haul those items to recycling centers would be included in the special assessment district fee.

Nothing has been decided yet about the Lakeside green box site, but Prunty said a similar option is likely to be looked at there.

“I would venture to guess we’ll do the same thing in Lakeside,” he said. The board prioritized dealing with Bigfork first because of higher safety concerns around the current site on Montana Highway 83.

The board will begin discussions with the Montana Department of Transportation, which owns the land where the Lakeside site is located, to expand the current site. If the state isn’t open to the expansion then the Solid Waste Board will likely look for land to purchase in Lakeside, Prunty said.

Lakeside is reaching out to Bigfork to help with its new site. The Lakeside community garden has offered to contribute 50 yellow plum trees for the landscaping.